ear the south bank of the Rangitata, where
his tomb doubtless may now be seen, his last earthly resting place; and,
dear old man, with all his strong antipathy to horses, what would he
have thought could he have known that one was destined at last to be the
cause of his death?

As a set-off against the previous sad story I may relate an amusing one,
in which I was myself a principal actor, and which occurred soon after
my arrival at Mesopotamia. Butler was much exercised about some
experimental grass-growing he was carrying on about three miles from the
station, on the further side of one of the boundary streams I first
referred to, where he had recently secured another slice of country.

Early one morning I had started alone on foot for the paddocks, where
Butler and Cook were to meet me later, riding, and if I found the stream
too high to ford on foot, I was to await their arrival.

On reaching the river it was so swollen as to be unsafe to attempt
fording, and so, lighting my pipe, I sat down under the shelter of a
large boulder, and presently fell asleep. When I woke up, after some
considerable time, and remembered where I was, I feared that Cook and
Butler must have passed while I slept, and was on the point of returning
to the station, when I observed two horsemen a long way down stream,
apparently searching for something. I speedily understood what was on
foot. My friends were laboriously seeking for my dead body, having
naturally supposed, when they could not find me at the paddock, that I
had tried to ford the river and been washed away. The idea of these two
men spending the morning hunting for a supposed drowned man, who was
enjoying a sound sleep near them all the time, was so ludicrous that I
could not refrain from an immoderate fit of laughter when they arrived.

Butler was hot-tempered, and anything approaching to ridicule where he
himself was concerned was a mortal insult. He turned pale with passion
and rode off, and I do not think he ever entirely forgave me for not
being drowned when he had undertaken so much trouble to discover my
body.

It was at Mesopotamia that I noticed so many remains of that extinct
bird, the "Moa," and it appeared that some of the species had inhabited
that locality not very many years previously. Indeed, some old Maoris I
had met on the Ashburton said they remembered the bird very well. It was
not uncommon to come across a quantity of bones, and near by them a heap
of sm